Highclere Park, Newbury, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

Highclere was granted in AD 749 to the church at Winchester, the northern part of the present park forming a deer park with fishponds from the 12th century. The bishops of Winchester had a palace at Highclere from at least the 13th century, on or near the site of the present house, to which Bishop William of Wykeham carried out extensive building work in the late 14th century (Brown 1998). Following his death in 1404, Highclere declined and its park was leased as farmland until the whole estate was sequestered by Edward VI in 1551. The king granted it to William Fitzwilliam, after whose death it was bought by Richard Kingsmill in 1572, but for the eighty or so years following his death in 1600, his heirs, the Lucy family, were frequently absent, living on their estates at Charlcot in Warwickshire. They seem to have undertaken building work however in the early 17th century at a manor house called 'Highclere Place house' and the existence of gardens is also recorded (Particulars of the Manor ..., around 1641-57). In 1679, Highclere was bought by Sir Robert Sawyer, a successful lawyer and Attorney General under Charles II and James II, who began to restore the estate and to initiate the layout of a formal landscape (Brown 1998). His grandson, Robert Sawyer Herbert, inheriting on the death of his mother Mary in 1706, continued the process of formalisation on a vast scale, creating a rococo landscape of walks, drives, and avenues ornamented with garden buildings and follies, several of which still (1998) survive. The Rev Jeremiah Milles described this landscape in his Account of a Tour in Hampshire and Sussex, made in 1743. The estate was inherited in 1769 by Robert Sawyer Herbert's nephew, Henry Herbert, created Lord Porchester in 1780 and Earl of Carnarvon in 1793. In 1770 he commissioned Lancelot Brown (1716-83) to prepare a survey and proposals for the park, the work being recorded in Brown's account book as including 'a general plan for the grounds' and 'a plan for the intended water and the alterations about it'. A surviving plan, which is probably the general plan, shows Brown having remodelled in his informal style much of the existing woodland and tree features recorded on a survey of 1768 (which survives as a copy made by Major Bull in 1795). Milford Lake is shown similar to its present form and a second lake is proposed at Duns Mere. The execution of the scheme, and the planting of hundreds of trees including many cedars, seems to have been undertaken, albeit in a modified form, by Henry Herbert himself (Stroud 1975). The first Earl was succeeded in 1811 by his son, Henry George, who enlarged Milford Lake and established the present surrounding rhododendron and azalea gardens; early 19th-century account books at Highclere record a wide range of exotic trees and shrubs being introduced into the park and propagated to produce well-known hybrids such as Rhododendron altarclerense. Henry John George, third Earl of Carnarvon, inherited in 1833 and in 1838 engaged Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860) to prepare designs for the complete remodelling of the house to its present form, which was undertaken from 1842, the interiors being completed from 1860 by the fourth Earl. The fifth Earl, who inherited in 1890, is probably best remembered as a keen Egyptologist and for his discovery, with Howard Carter, of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. Highclere descended through the Herbert family in the 20th century and remains (1998) in private hands.